Whores of Babylon, page 5
Vaulted bazaars opened off either side, thronged hives of commerce where sacks of corn and sesame seeds, boxes of dried fish, bundles of reeds, skins and wool and cheeses were changing hands. Porters rushed to and fro, cursed by merchants and factors. Several auctions were simultaneously in full swing, in addition to the individual business of bargaining. So much complex bustle deterred Alex from wandering under the vaults and soon he arrived in the temple forecourt, hoping to find it less crowded than the precincts.
It did prove to be; though only by comparison and due to the sizable acreage of the forecourt, where numerous vendors were peddling incense and oil and bleating lambs, bowls of wine, rissoles, and amulets to the steady trickle of citizens who made their way through one or other of several gates in the walls surrounding the court. These walls, enamelled blue and yellow, were high, though distance eventually dwarfed them. Those were smooth, firm walls with no loose bricks, naked to public view.
The temple itself looked complicated, with potential nooks and crannies. Broad ramps sloped steeply upward, zigzagging and bisecting one another, circuiting the tower-tipped tiers of the dun-coloured edifice which was the colour of dried blood. Up these ramps climbed worshippers, while others descended. Could all these people really be intent on prayer? To a god of war? Or did they wish only to exercise themselves and admire the view from the summit?
Impelled by curiosity, Alex accosted one departing worshipper, bearded and turbaned, swinging an ornate ivory-handled walking stick.
‘Excuse me, Sir. Fm a visitor. Do you really worship the god of war here?’ (Or is it only to ‘fix your mind’ for the day?)
The man flushed angrily. ‘Fool!’ he snarled, and shoved Alex aside.
Another, older man heard this exchange. He approached, smiling in wry apology, and stood twiddling his own bull-headed, bronze-bound stick.
‘Perhaps, Greek, it is purer to worship gods who don’t exist?’ he offered cryptically. ‘Perhaps worshipping them causes them to exist? On the other hand, where else can you innocently worship war in these late days? Maybe these worshippers are simply searching for their own lost innocence - the innocence of the beast, which does not ask whether the sun will rise tomorrow. Or even whether tomorrow will exist.’
‘Yes? Go on.’
The old man had a time-lined, dusty face, as though dirt had entered the many cracks and ingrained itself. Alex felt that he was looking at an aged version of himself.
Fondling the bronze bull in his hand, the man said, ‘The beast knows nothing of tomorrow. Yesterday is already erased. All is now, the present, the moment. The moment repeats itself for ever.Thus the beast and his kind endure for a million years. In place of history they possess instinct. But perhaps, Greek, the gods of war destroy empires - with all their records and monuments — every so often, otherwise the weight of memory would cripple us beneath its burden? We wouldn’t have the energy for new enterprises; which are really the same old enterprises, forgotten then rekindled.’
What was Alex to make of this? Was the old man a philosopher, a fantasist, a fool? Or a futurologist? Was he saying that the world, and civilization, had to be destroyed — so that the world could continue? That America must fall into decay so that the empire of Amazonia or Ashanti could arise? Surely he was forgetting about all the nuclear missiles poised in their silos, cradled in their submarines? Was it possible that society could simply collapse, and the missiles remain where they were, rusting, unfireable?
Alex didn’t dare phrase such questions here, only a few hundred paces from Marduk’s temple.
The old man executed a little skip around his walking stick.
‘And perhaps, Greek,’ he said, ‘Marduk has nothing to do with war. Don’t assume that you’re wise, merely because you’re a foreigner. What happens elsewhere is mirrored here. What happens here is mirrored elsewhere. You’re here to discover Babylon. Babylon isn’t here to discover you.’
He winked, and began to stride off in sprightly style.
‘Thank you for your courtesy, sir!’ Alex called after him.
‘My pleasure. My whim.’
‘How do you mean, “Babylon isn’t here to discover me”?’
The man wagged a finger. ‘You Greeks have a saying: Know Thyself. Explore thyself. You’re quite wrong. Your own life has no purpose and no goal - though of course the world would be purposeless without any people in it. Accumulate information, my boy! Forget about generalities and principles! Compile the list of whatever happens to you - never try to sum that list up.’
Wagging his hand in farewell, the man went on his way, leaving Alex baffled. Maybe that had been his mischievous intention: to call Alex a fool at much greater length than the other man, and more circuitously.
On the subject of circuits, the zigzag ramps of the temple awaited. Alex still had to hide the tape, which might be packed with information, or might be blank.
* * *
He stood puffing at the summit of the temple. His heart beat fast, and the package still pressed against his bowels.
He had passed too many people on the way. One intersection of the ramps had been occupied by a great cage of tiny scampering monkeys with inquisitive bright eyes. A lower intersection had opened into the heart of the temple, ruddily lamplit and shadowy, where shapes of magi moved beneath looming fearsome statues and where linen curtains concealed musicians - he heard kettledrums beating softly, harps rippling like waterfalls, the whistling of an ocarina, entertainment for Marduk while the god’s brazen nostrils inhaled the reek of charring flesh and blood. Within, the geometric temple was a cavern, its pillars resembling stalagmites. Hiding places abounded, but also places from which hidden figures could easily spy whatever he did. You would have to be a habitue to hide anything safely there.
So he rested at the summit for a while, taking in the view: the sprawling, walled suburbs over the water to the west where garden green glinted amidst houses; the bend of the Euphrates to the south, with the Borsippa canal forking off into farmland; the road to Nippur to the east.
Behind him a terracotta dragon - like those at the Ishtar Gate, but rampant - reared to half his height again, a spade gripped in one claw to support it. Spade and dragon: symbols of Marduk. Lower down the ramps he had passed terracotta statues of lions, too. A spiky lightning rod rose highest. He kept his back to the dragon, letting it block the view to the north where the Tower of Babel pulled at his mind.
Defeated, yet feeling that none the less he had scaled a peak, he descended the ramps again.
* * *
Emerging from the courtyard by the west gate, he soon found himself upon the river road a few hundred cubits south of the great stone bridge. People of many nationalities passed by, as though the port of the world was here. He saw Arabs, Armenians, Indians, fellow- Greeks (of course); even a Chinese face. He soon spotted Deborah leaning on the balustrade of the corniche, alone. Before he could reach her, to his exasperation Gupta appeared up steps from the quays below, grinning.
‘Greetings, Alex! Did you find what you were seeking? Or did you lose it? Ha ha! Did you pray for guidance? If so, here I am.’
Alex realized that he had quite forgotten to pray. Well, that wasn’t true. He never had any intention of praying; but maybe he ought to have done so . . .
‘Hi, Alex,’ said Deb.
‘What’s down below?’ he asked her, making no effort to look over for himself. Big coracles were spinning inshore to tie up.
How the ungainly craft avoided dashing themselves against the piers of the bridge upstream was a puzzle, unless the answer was that the water obligingly funnelled them through. That was the only bridge over the Euphrates, and it was crowded with traffic passing between old city and new. From stout pier to stout pier stretched rows of planks. (Every night - as Alex later learned - the central sections were lifted and stacked ashore under guard. You did not build a bridge for your enemies to cross! Yet this was in the very heart of Babylon. Was the heart sick, divided against itself? Or was this a bridge between two hemispheres of the Babylonian brain; and every night when the city slept did it dream two separate dreams: the dream of the past, and the dream of the future?)
‘What’s down there, Deb?’
‘Tunnels to the bazaars/ she told him. ‘The crews unload, then break up their boats, and drive their donkeys through the tunnels. Tunnels are what’s down there. And one weeping rabbi.’
‘A who?’ Now Alex did lean over the balustrade. Immediately he saw the bearded figure who was facing the wall, skullcap on his crown, prayer shawl around his shoulders, the black box of a phylactery fastened with ribbon to his forehead like a container for buttons, comfits, or pills; with his back to the boats and donkeys and baskets of fruit and skins of wine and crans of fish, with tears running down his cheeks.
‘He comes here every morning,’ said Gupta, ‘to mourn the ruin of the temple of Solomon. Many more Jews camp out on the quay road on festival days. They want nothing to do with pagan rites.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘How is it crazy?’
‘Why should people pretend to be Jews, or rabbis?’ ‘They are Jews,’ said Deborah sharply. ‘He is a rabbi.’
‘Oh,’ said Alex.
They lunched on fish cakes from a stall. While they were licking their fingers clean afterwards, Gupta said, ‘Let’s visit the Wonder Cabinet of Mankind.’ He glanced at the high, hot sun. ‘This afternoon, after siesta?’ Indeed, traffic was already beginning to thin out. It was past noon. People were returning home.
‘Shall we? I’d like to show you both the famous Wonder Cabinet. Though if I built a cabinet myself, ha ha, it would have different sorts of wonders in it!’ ‘Wonders which vanish before your very eyes. Like soap bubbles,’ suggested Alex.
‘Shall we?’ pressed Gupta.
‘Yes,’ said Deborah.
* * *
They returned to Between The Skin Shops and sought their cool rooms.
During his siesta Alex dreamed: that the missiles had all flown, the bombs had all fallen. Russia and America were no more; Europe and China had been wiped off the map. Man-made plagues raged elsewhere. It was the collapse, the end of technological culture, of global governments.
Somehow Babylon survived. Here in the loneliest corner of the American desert - though there was no longer any 'America’ - Babylon remained intact, entire. Untouched. And continued being Babylon.
It was as though all the power released by the warheads had torn a hole in the continuum of time and space; had scrambled the clock of the sun and the calendar of the moon; and had sucked this ancient city from out of a previous era to deposit it in the future, as the only future which remained.
Babylon thrived. The Euphrates flowed round and round. Seasons passed; then decades. Eventually the Babylonians began to colonize what was once America. They knew nothing, any longer, of the customs or speech of the dead America or of the dead twentieth century. They knew only Babylonian ways. Long hair and perfume; coracles and ziggurats; Ishtar and Marduk. Yes, Marduk had won a great, much-prayed- for victory.
But elsewhere, far away, was a new Assyrian wolf or a second Alexander marshalling his forces in Angola or Argentina, to collide with Babylon once more?
The Wonder Cabinet of Mankind occupied one corner of the backside of the royal palace. This was the first museum in the history of the world, opened to the general public by Nebuchadnezzar.
‘Ha ha,’ laughed Gupta, ‘behold the wonders of the world!’
The long dim gallery with its spiral roof supports was full of antiquities; amongst which were clay tablets and cylinders, inscriptions from Ur, stone bowls and figurines of Aramaic weather gods, Kassite clubs, Mesopotamian statuary, foundation stones of antique temples, reliefs, stelae, Theban obelisks, mace-heads and cudgels, jewellery, breastplates, bric-a-brac. And so on, and on. The three were the only visitors.
‘What marvels!’ cried Gupta. It was hard to tell whether he was fascinated or sarcastic.
Perhaps the curator - a dour antiquity himself, armed with a feather duster - thought Gupta was pouring scorn. He trudged over, flicking at pots and ancient stones.
He addressed Deborah and Alex, ignoring the raucous Indian: ‘Here is the whole span of time, Greeks.’
For a moment Alex believed him; for gone was the Rome of the Caesars, and the Rome of the popes. Gone was the crucifix; gone was the mosque. Gone, the Renaissance. Gone, the space age. They were not, as yet. So they had never been.
Deborah must have felt it deeply too.
‘Isn’t it strange?’ she murmured. ‘There’s so much that isn’t here.’
‘Almost everything we ever thought important isn’t here,’ said Alex, glad that she had apparently stepped outside her role - under the influence not of the living city, but of dead stones.
‘And yet,’ she continued, ‘this world’s just as full, with all its own ancient history stretching way behind it.’
He tried to match himself to her mood. ‘And the future - the culmination of the past — had hardly begun when this museum was opened. Had it, now?
What a fantasy that future seems! What a fever dream. Of men like gods flying through the sky and through space, and wielding bolts of lightning, and sending their thoughts and pictures from place to place in an instant. It’s as though mythology lies ahead, not behind.’
The whole span of time,’ repeated the curator with emphasis.
Alex whispered to Deborah, ‘Imagine that there’s such a thing as a twentieth century. Then skip on, another thousand years. What a puny thing the twentieth century would seem. Because A hadn’t happened yet. Or B, or Gamma - which is so goddamn important, so crucial to history that it changes everything absolutely. Visitors from the stars, immortality, I don’t know what. Then a thousand years later A, B, and Gamma will have been totally dwarfed by Delta and Omega . . .’
She stared wildly around the Wonder Cabinet. ‘To believe that this is the whole span! To know it in your very soul! Why, this frees us from time’s water wheel. We shall swim with the flood of years instead of being drowned.’
‘That’s why we were sent to Babylon,’ he said. ‘Sent by a world which isn't here, and never has been.’ Give or take, he thought, a certain computer tape . . .
‘Now you see it, now you don’t,’ quipped Gupta.
‘The whole span,’ the curator intoned, as if those were the only words he knew; as though he were a guardian golem equipped with the simplest of responses - plus a feather duster.
‘Sent to learn how not to drown.’ Alex sighed.
Yes indeed: there were wonders here, though the wonder did not reside in the worn old clubs and obelisks, in the clay and bronze of this first museum - as opposed to, say, steam engines or Saturn rockets or computers. The wonder dawned when you entered a frame of mind in which such things as rockets, satellites, wrist computers and heart transplants were simply equal to cudgels and breastplates; when you saw the twentieth century through the other end of the telescope of time. That was to grasp the real, far future.
Alex thought to himself: we have built us an alien city, as if on Mars. We built it to alienate us from the big dipper of the present, which seemed about to fly apart. As soon as Babylon is no longer alien to us we can start to redeem the future. We can purge it of its threat. We can know it - not by Delphi methods or computer projections, world models or algorithms rooted in the present. Not by reason. But emotionally.
Then, too, he might begin to understand his own emotions. Particularly his emotions towards Deborah, whatever those might be.
‘While we were asleep this afternoon,’ he confided - thus joining his sleep to hers - ‘I dreamt of war.’
‘If you visit Marduk,’ exclaimed Gupta brightly, ‘what else do you expect?’
The magic moment was gone.
Deborah laughed giddily. ‘That’s enough junk for one afternoon. Let’s get out of here.’
Gupta took her by the arm.
Outside, she was again a visiting Greek lady. She detached herself from Gupta, and walked on her own.
Next morning, despite summons by gong, Deborah did not present herself for her breakfast porridge. The four traders had departed with their donkeys the day before, and only one new guest had replaced them: a liverish, abrupt woman of indeterminate age who had parked a hand-barrow hutch of speckled hens in the courtyard.
= She sat there in the dining room, pecking at her porridge with a spoon; Nabu was there too - though for all the conversation he made, he might well have swallowed his own tongue, Gupta fashion; and Gupta also, wreathed in vague smiles; and of course the humming serving woman patrolled.
Alex pushed his empty bowl aside. ‘Deborah must have slept in. I’d better rouse her.’
‘Aha,’ said Gupta. ‘She has gone. Off to the temple of Ishtar at dawn. Bright and early, rise and shine.’ ‘You’re joking.’
‘Certainly not. I was up and about too, doing my yogic exercises to remain sprightly.’
‘At least you didn’t hare off after her,’ grunted Nabu. ‘Give her a head start, eh?’
‘Why should I pursue her? I am not a stranger to her, Nabu. I do not qualify for her favours this morning. Actually,’ (and he leered at Alex) ‘I dare say that she went so early so that she could experience sitting outside the temple a while. Few men hunt for a fuck in the early morning, unless already abed with a receptacle for their dawn erection. Ha ha, their own cockcrow! At a busier hour, I dare say a woman of her calibre would be snapped up speedily. Maybe it was modesty which sent her out early. Who knows?’ ‘Excuse me.’ Alex left in haste.
Unfortunately, the Libil-hegalla canal interrupted his beeline towards Ishtar’s temple. He arrived at a platform between two warehouses overlooking the wide, murky water; a cul-de-sac. Several coracles were being poled along: one laden with cabbages, another with chairs, a third with sheepskins. In both directions until the waterway bent out of sight the backs of buildings plunged down into it, some with loading bays. From the mouths of pipes in many walls brown stains drooled into the water - which did not, however, smell unwholesome, since the canal flowed along at a leisurely though perceptible rate.
